Orchard Portraits Video Installation

Choreographer Rosemary Lee brings her unique sensibilities to both landscape and people to create a new video-work made collaboratively with filmmaker Roswitha Chesher – inspired by and shot in the historic wild orchard at West Horsley Place.

See Orchard Portraits when you visit the manor house for a tour, Open Day or other event or every Thursday afternoon 2-5pm.

Filmed over a year through the four seasons, ORCHARD PORTRAITS features five senior performers, each in a meditative and elegant duet with their chosen ageing tree. As human and tree become entwined almost as one, there is a sense of deep unity seeming to pay tribute to humanity’s ancient and ongoing intimate relationship with trees. In contrast we are reminded of natures’ cycles of regeneration as 60 school children burst through the orchard in moments of joy and discovery.

Bringing the beauty of outside in, this seven-screen video installation will inhabit the stone hall of West Horsley Place throughout the summer/autumn of 2023.

Performers: Nancy Budd, Violet Clare, Andrew Hamel-Cooke, Jim Tucker and Helen Scalway.

Year 5/6(2022) from The Raleigh School, West Horsley, Surrey.

Original concept and Choreography: Rosemary Lee

Director of Photography: Roswitha Chesher

Editing: Roswitha Chesher with Rosemary Lee

Costumes: Susan Dinmore